What had he done to me?
“Where am I?” I slurred a little, realizing my bottom lip was swollen and cut. Forcing my one eye open again, I tried to focus on what was before me.
Bars. The other cage wasn’t too far away.
Jesus. I wanted to cry, but I was too proud. And the pain would be terrible. He must have knocked me out cold.
“You’re exactly where you should be,” Declan responded, and I could almost make out his silhouette. I had to snap my eyes shut again.
“Why are you doing this?” I grumbled.
My brain scrambled to make sense of everything, but there was only one answer: Andrei or Oleg had alerted Declan to who I was. Of course, he might not know I was FBI. He might just think I’m on a revenge mission, like Connor did . . . But did it matter? He had me in a Goddamn cage.
“Olivia Scott, my sweet assistant. You know exactly why.” The sound of his voice chilled my body.
I pressed up against the cool bars of the cage. With my one eye open, I caught sight of Declan with his hands casually hidden inside his pockets.
He was wearing a dark suit, as though he was about to broker a deal. Oh God, with Connor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I slipped the words out before softly moaning at the pain that wreaked havoc on my face. “I promise.”
He cocked his head at me, and I tried to make out my surroundings. I could hear noise from above, maybe. I wasn’t sure. Fighting against the ringing in my ears, I listened.
Were we in the basement of a club? There was concrete flooring, cement walls, and pipes trailing above my head in the exposed ceiling. It was a vast space. My nose wasn’t working great, but it felt cool, damp, and had a bit of a musty smell. Yes, it had to be a basement.
Was it The Phoenix? I’d never been down below before. It couldn’t be late enough for the club to be open already, could it? How long had I been unconscious?
“What time is it? Where am I?”
Declan removed his hands from his pockets, pressed one palm to the outside of the cage and smirked at me. Damn bastard. “You’ve been curious about these cages, and now you know. They’re reserved for naughty girls like you.”
I glanced down in the direction of Declan’s gaze. My tank top was spray-painted in my own blood—probably from my lips. I rolled my tongue over my teeth, checking for any missing ones. Thank God, they appeared to be intact. Of course, what did that matter? I would probably never make it out alive. Especially if Konstantin had anything to do with it.
“Declan, please.”
He took a step back and folded his arms. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, Liv.” His dark brown eyes bore into me as if he was attempting to collect my soul. “Who killed Jessie, anyway—was it Andrei or Oleg? They couldn’t even remember who had pulled the trigger.” He casually scratched the back of his neck, but I knew he was goading me.
He crouched down so we were at eye level and he gripped the bars, pressing his face close to the metal. “You learn anything interesting while spying on me?” His voice was low, a seductive whisper of darkness, attempting to rope me in.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“FBI agent Olivia Scott. It’s so nice to finally meet the real you.”
My lungs expanded, needling my ribs, and I released a long, slow breath. The thin glimmer of hope disappeared. He knew the truth; there’d be no way out.
He shifted back to a standing position but kept his eyes on me. “You seem surprised. I can tell by the look in your,” he paused and grinned, “one good eye.”
Asshole. “I don’t know what you think you know, but I won’t tell you a damn thing.”
He snickered while he popped open a button on his blazer and crossed his arms. “You actually think you have anything valuable to say to me?” He flashed his teeth.
How’d he find out? Andrei and Oleg wouldn’t have been able to figure out I was FBI, right?
“People know where I am. They’ll come looking for me.” Blake. Connor. One of them would find me. They had no idea where I was, but they would look.
I had to cling to that hope, at least.
Declan pulled a phone with a metallic case from his pocket, a phone I assumed to be mine. “I told your boyfriend that you were needed in Vegas. I didn’t want him worrying about you.”
Connor. So, Declan didn’t know about Blake? “Connor’s not involved in this. I promise.” My desperate plea to save him was probably wasted breath, but I had to try. “We reconnected. It’s just sex with him.” God, I hated saying that to Declan, but I’d do anything to keep Connor safe.
Declan’s lips twisted into another sinister smile. “I’m fully aware of your relationship with Connor. In fact, I supported it.”
What in the hell was he talking about? I was tired of playing his mind games. “What do you want from me?” I shouted, and then flinched.
“You’re just a tool, Olivia. Don’t get too excited.”
“A tool for what?” The words sprang free from my lips as I rose to my feet.
“You’re tough.” He circled the cage, and my head shifted each direction to maintain contact with him as he moved. “But you’re not tough enough, or smart enough, to go up against me. Or the Russian mafia. Everyone who has tried has failed.”
He stopped in front of me, and I clung to the bars, dying to break free and knock the glorified sneer from his face. He thought he had won, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t give up. “I managed to fool you for a pretty long time, don’t you think?” I responded, knowing I shouldn’t taunt him, but unable to stop myself.
“You think I didn’t know? Or that your sudden promotion had to do with your fantastic ass, I mean, your managerial skills?” His breath was on my face; my skin crawled at his words.
“Someone will find me. Konstantin might think he’s untouchable, but you aren’t.” I took a shaky step back.
He reached for the knot at his tie and tightened it while peering up at me from hooded eyes. “Oh, you mean your boss?” His long fingers blazed down his tie before he tucked it inside his suit jacket and clasped the button of his blazer once again. “Blake?” He scoffed
Fear melted my insides, turning me into nothing more than liquid. The floor dropped beneath me. “What happened to him?” I choked.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Connor
I glanced down at the steel case that housed the EMF gun. When I dropped by the office, I had dismissed all employees, demanding they take a long weekend for all of their hard work. It hadn’t been easy to get those go-getters to leave work early, but I had no choice. I couldn’t exactly waltz out of the building with the technology and go unnoticed.
I didn’t take the gun then, though. I waited and went back once the office was cleared out. I couldn’t risk raising any red flags if anyone saw me with the case. CEO or not, it could cause problems.
“I need to talk to you before you go,” Jake hollered as I stood by the front door, prepared to leave.
I checked my watch. It was quarter of eleven. “The meeting is in forty-five minutes. Did you find something?” Our plan was set. I thought we were good to go.
“I just found something on your father’s computer. Or, I should say, in the cloud.” Of course—the proverbial cloud of data that floated above our heads.
“What’d you find?” I went into the kitchen, where he was sitting in front of my father’s computer.
“He erased some files from his computer and his tablet, but the information was still stored in the cloud.” He tapped at a few buttons. “Look at these photos. Look at the dates.”
I zoomed in, pressing my fingers against the touchscreen, and my hand fell to my side. “This is a picture of Mason in uniform—in the Middle East, no less.” I observed Jake, my body growing hot, my heart rate kicking up. “The picture was taken last September. He was stationed in Saudi Arabia at the time.”
I re
leased a strangled breath and looked at the next photo. It was of me, standing in front of my friend Michael Maddox’s brownstone.
“Your mother is in the next image. Also taken in September.”
“Was my dad spying on us?”
“Tell me, why would he have a picture of Olivia?”
Olivia was jogging at the Constitution Gardens in D.C.—it must have been before she’d started working for Declan. “What the hell?”
“There’s more—”
My ringing phone stopped him. “It’s Ben,” I said after pulling the phone from my pocket. “Hey. Everything okay?”
There was a moment of silence on the line. Then, “Olivia’s not in Vegas.”
I braced my hand on the back of the barstool as my feet staggered back. “What do you mean?” My heart started to thunder in my chest.
Jake looked at me and raised his hand in the air.
“She wasn’t at the club. I checked with my buddy who works security at the casino where her club is, and he said she never checked in. Actually, she didn’t have any type of reservation.”
Ben’s words shook me, stealing my breath as nervousness ripped through my body like a tidal wave. I couldn’t respond. My mind was racing with possibilities, and the only one that made sense was that she was in serious trouble.
“I don’t have any contacts at the airport, so I don’t know if she ever flew to Vegas. I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I muttered, “Thank you,” and hung up without thinking. “Olivia didn’t make it to the hotel in Vegas.”
“You think that text wasn’t from her then? Or did she lie?”
“Why would she lie?” She lied about a lot of things, but I hardly believed she’d make up a trip to Vegas.
“Well, the thing is—I know Olivia,” Jake said slowly. My hand lifted from the barstool and my fingers curved into a fist at my side as I braced myself for whatever news Jake was about to deliver.
“I recognized her from the picture.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “I didn’t know your ex was Olivia Scott. She’s FBI.”
“You must be mistaken.” There was no hesitation. “That she would have told me. Right?” We came clean with each other. Why would she withhold that information from me?
“She was a student of mine at Quantico. When I realized who she was, I checked the FBI database. She’s currently on assignment in New York under the leadership of Blake Manning. The details of her case are classified, though.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. A lot of things were making more sense, now. But still—the FBI?
“That explains why someone was asking me about you.”
“Isn’t this a conflict of interest?” I folded my arms across my chest, still not sure if I could believe what he was telling me. Olivia, an FBI agent? “Konstantin’s guys killed her sister. Surely the FBI wouldn’t allow Olivia to work on a case involving Konstantin.”
Jake half shrugged. “When you sign up with the FBI, they learn everything about you. Hell, they use polygraph tests on us. They interview family members. They probably even know she once dated you.”
“Wait.” I held my hand out in front of me. “Really?”
“Yeah. They know all my dirty laundry.” He grimaced.
“She’s in danger, Jake. Declan must know, and he probably has her.” The color drained from my face. “Are they going to use her to get to me?”
“Shit. I hope not.”
“None of this explains why my father had surveillance photos of me, Mason, Olivia—hell, even my mother.”
“We’d better figure it out and quick because you have to meet with Declan soon.”
“If anything happened to Olivia . . .” I couldn’t finish my thought. My blood heated as I sank to the barstool, my mind clambering to make sense of it all.
“We’ll get your girl back, Connor.”
***
Olivia
I knew my one eye was swollen, and my “good” eye hurt, so it took me a minute to decide whether my eyes were playing tricks on me.
He moved across the large room, and I noticed an uptick in the beat of the music above. It wasn’t The Phoenix, I realized. The Phoenix didn’t play 90s throwback jams. So where was I?
When the man stopped in front of me, I squeezed my eye shut again. There was no way.
He was just a mirage. He had to be.
“You pummeled her face pretty bad.”
I sucked in a breath at the sound of Blake’s voice. What did it mean? No, I refused to accept it.
“She deserved it,” Declan answered.
Blake’s fingers curved around the bars, covering mine as my knuckles whitened. At his touch, I jerked my hands free and banged against the back of the six-foot tall, oval-shaped cage. The dark steel gleamed, taunting me, as I opened my one eye to look at him.
My boss. My mentor. My ex-lover.
My enemy?
Declan stood a few feet behind Blake, a look of satisfaction spreading across his face. He relished my shock.
“What’s going on?” A whisper stole the words from my brain and delivered them to Blake.
Blake removed his hands from the bars and gripped the back of his neck with one hand. “I help Konstantin out whenever our interests align. I volunteered to be on the case when I heard they were going after him again.” Blake’s blue eyes were sharp on me.
A knife of betrayal impaled me, and I had to gather my strength. I thought it was luck that he’d landed the case—lucky for me so I could help lock the man up. “And how’d your interests align?”
Money?
“How long have you been on the take?” My cheeks grew warm, and my hands clawed at the fabric of my pants as anger gathered inside me.
Blake leaned his back against the empty cage and stared down at the floor, avoiding eye contact with me. Was he embarrassed by his deceit? Remorseful? Not that it mattered at this point. I groaned as I realized the sheer futility of it all. The man I’d been reporting to for the last nine months had been on the other team, all this time. All of my sacrifices had been for nothing.
“You wouldn’t understand, Olivia. Things aren’t always so black and white.”
“FBI.” I raised one hand, then the other. “Criminals. Pretty clear cut to me.” I forced myself to remain standing, even though my body begged to drop, to mourn my losses. “Well, until an FBI agent becomes a criminal.” I shook my head in disgust. “So, I wasted the last nine months, for you to do—what? Destroy any evidence and report that Konstantin can’t be taken down?”
Blake’s eyes were finally on me, but it was Declan’s voice in my ears. “Do you really think any of this is a coincidence, Olivia?” Declan came up next to Blake, eager to hammer me down.
My nostrils flared. “What do you mean?”
“Your idea to come after me set everything in motion. And now, I have you to thank for the fact that I’m thirty minutes away from finally getting my hands on the EMF gun. I’m about to become a billionaire.” Declan toyed with the cuffs on his blazer. “You think that a job just happened to come open at my company in September when you pitched your idea to Blake? Or that your promotion had nothing to do with the fact that Edward Matthews was dead, and your ex-lover would be taking over the company?”
My lower lip trembled at his words. “Even the Russian mafia’s not safe if terrorists attack New York again.”
Declan angled his head and studied me. “What are you talking about?”
Blake pushed away from the cage and came near me. “She’s—”
“I didn’t tell you about the terrorists,” Declan interrupted. “What’s going on?” Declan was standing in front of Blake, his finger against Blake’s muscled chest.
“Oh? He didn’t tell you that we hacked your computer at the club? Maybe Blake was saving a little something in his back pocket to use against you.” I tried to remain confident as I dealt with the two magnum-sized egos that held my fate in their hands.
“I had to.
She ran the idea by Sean, and I couldn’t say no, or it would look suspicious,” Blake defended. “I didn’t think Sean would uncover anything.”
Blake was now the target of Declan’s vicious stare. “Why didn’t you tell me you found something?”
“I didn’t have a chance.” Blake cleared his throat. “Besides, you never told me the weapons from Matthews Tech were going to extremists in the Middle East.”
Declan sniggered. “Would that have mattered?”
Blake shook his head. “But I might have demanded more cash.”
Disappointment stabbed me. “I understand Declan’s lack of morals, but Blake, you’re a federal agent, what happened to you?” I couldn’t allow myself to indulge in the sadness that attempted to strangle hold of me. I needed to stay strong. I had to get through this.
“Money goes a long way, sweet thing,” Declan answered for him.
“Call me sweet thing one more time.” I gripped the bars, wishing I had Hulk-like strength to tear them apart.
Declan ignored me, his focus on Blake. “I want whatever information you took from my computer.” His deep voice grew loud in my ears. At least my hearing was fully functional again.
“Of course,” Blake said, holding his hands up.
I tried to run through the last nine months in my mind, searching for signs I’d missed. “You really used me to try and get Connor to make the deal?” I cringed at the thought, but everything made sense now.
Both Blake and Declan had pushed me to get close to Connor—manipulating my past to their advantage. Even going so far as to scare me with Andrei and Oleg’s presence. Blake had never been worried for my safety. Goddamn him. He should have been nominated for actor of the year. “How’d you know I wouldn’t go behind your back and reveal the truth to Connor?”
“Of course you told Connor the truth.” Declan guffawed. “Can you believe this one, Blake? She’ll say anything.” He pulled out his cell phone and tapped at the screen before his cold eyes focused back on me.
“I ordered her not to tell him, but I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyway, right? You just need to get the weapon, and then we can finally be done with Matthews Tech.”
Buried Lies (Hidden Truths) Page 22
